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Murder in Mexico (part two)

The lawless Mexican border town of Juarez is no stranger to death. Fiefdom of the infamous narco-trafficante 'Lord of the Skies', its fortunes are built on hard drugs and cheap labour. But now an even more ruthless menace stalks its dusty streets

In October 1995, the authorities moved. Abdel Latif Sharif, an Egyptian former maquila engineer, was arrested and accused of seven murders. The case hit problems: one of the women he was accused of murdering, Elizabeth Ontiveros, turned up alive. The police forensic expert on the case, Irma Rogriguez, said that the bite marks on his alleged victims did not match Sharif's teeth.

Police then arrested a group of night-club workers belonging to a gang, the Rebels, charging that Sharif paid them to kill 17 women while jailed. Los Rebeldes are awaiting trial for seven murders including that of Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, while Sharif's conviction for a single murder was overturned in 2000. But he remains in jail pending appeals by the prosecution. The authorities got another lead in February 1999, when a peasant opened his door one night to the sight of a 14-year-old called Nancy Llalba Gonzalez, blood streaming from a wound above her eye. A bus driver had violated her, tried to strangle her and left her for dead. The abuser, Jesus Manual Guardardo, and four members of his gang, the Toltecs, were arrested and accused of 15 murders, to which they admitted, but later withdrew their confessions, extracted, they said, under duress and torture.

Events then twisted along a strange course. On 13 May 1999, Sharif's lawyer, Irene Blanco, received a telephone call saying there had been a shoot-out between narco gangs and a victim, Eduardo 'Blancas'. She went to the hospital to find her son, severely wounded from three gunshots. He had been driving when the would-be assassins opened fire. Injured, he stepped on the gas, making it to the emergency ward. While he was being operated on, agents from the state police came, to ask the doctors whether he was dead or alive.

A month after the attempted murder, a newspaper in Mexico City, La Reforma , published the account of a whistleblower from the Juarez police, Victor Valenzuela. Valenzuela had gone to his superiors saying that he knew who was behind the murder of scores of women: a cartel in the drug and contraband business. The group was, more over, protected by the police and government officials, including the two senior police officers in charge of the Sharif case.

The crosses stand silent and spectral in the light of dusk. They rise from what was once a cotton field, now a dumping ground for old tyres, chemical drums, and stinking flotsam and jetsam. On the crosses - by contrast - sweet , fresh flowers are attached. Names are painted in careful script: Claudia Yvette, Brenda, Barbara, Desconocida (unidentified), Laura Bernice, Lupita, Esmeralda, Veronica'. They are the names of eight women whose mutilated bodies were found here on 21 November 2001. The land is exposed, at a busy road junction - rows of windows on the upper storeys of houses in a walled community overlook the site. No one wanted to see, or talk about, whoever left these cadavers, brazen for all to behold. But whatever message those who dumped the bodies wanted to deliver, there is one from those who erected these crosses: they do not only mark and mourn, they stare, in accusation: straight across the scrappy land, to the cylindrical offices of the Associacion De Maquiladoras Associacion Civil - the bonded factories' employers' federation.

During another dusk, on Mexico's Day of the Dead last November, women from the movement for justice gathered here in tribute 'not just to the eight, but to all the dead women', says Marisela Ortiz. Two torches were lit and planted in the ground. A cross made in stones was carved into the dirt and surrounded by candles. Flowers were strewn and the Requiem Mass said by two priests: 'Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace...' 'It is,' says Marisela, 'a funeral rite, a dignified burial for all of them.'

After years of little headway, the authorities declared that they had suddenly cracked the case. Within five days of the 'cotton-field' discovery, two bus drivers were arrested: Victor Javier Garcia and Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, and charged with the eight murders. Confessions were quickly secured, videotaped and shown to the press, with a suspense movie-style soundtrack. The drivers said they had been tortured, the authorities retorted that the wounds were 'self-inflicted'. The drivers retained counsel, Sergio Dante Almaraz and Mario Escobedo, ready to prove the procurement of invalid confessions under duress.

On the night of 5 February last year, Escobedo found his car being tailed by the police. He was on the phone to his father as the shooting started - the old man heard his son being murdered by a burst of automatic fire. The police say Escobedo was mistaken for a fugitive and had shot first. There were bullet holes in the police car to prove it. Co-counsel, Dante Almarez, says he was advised, meanwhile: 'If you do not drop the case, we'll kill you the same way we did Escobedo.'

'It was an execution,' says the man at the heart of the case. Oscar Maynez Griljava is former forensic chief for the Chihuahua state police, and handled the case of the two drivers. Maynez, having resigned in disgust at the end of January 2002, holds one of the few keys to this serpentine story. He is a young, puckish man who, for all his passionate involvement, talks with the professional's air of detachment. He was the first to alert his masters about the likelihood of a powerful consortium of killers behind the slaughter. He connected 56 murders between 1993 and 1999.

When Maynez examined the wounds on the two bus drivers (who remain in custody), he found the supposedly self-inflicted cigarette burns to their bodies and genitals to be, he says, the twin-pointed injuries made by two-pronged electrodes used by the police. As regards the Escobedo shooting, Maynez notes that bullet holes in the door of the police car were on the other side to that which faced the wreckage of the lawyer's car. And anyway, adds Maynez, 'Whoever shot those holes in the police car, they were not there immediately after the incident. Pictures clearly show no holes.'

Maynez points to no specific culprit, but is lucid on that about which he is certain. First, that 'the authorities and business interests in Juarez have been thoroughly narcoticised. Big drug cartels are a force you need to deal with if you go into government. You cannot fight that, and - more important - you are able to make a lot of money out of that'. Secondly, that, 'I think behind many of the murders lies an organised group with resources. The only certainty is that they will continue killing.'

The eight bodies in the cotton field were a last straw for Maynez, even before the torture of the bus drivers. When he checked their DNA, in only one case did forensic evidence match the named victim. With Oscar Maynez gone, the forensic burden fell upon Irma Rodriguez Galarza, who examined body after body, and even spent time roaming the streets under cover. On 25 July 2001, Dr Rodriguez was preparing a lecture in Mexico City when someone asked her if she had seen the news. Irma's daughter, Paloma Villa Rodriguez, and her husband, Sotero Alejandre Ledesma had been gunned down on the porch of the family home by men firing with AK47 rifles. The authorities expressed regret that the pair were caught in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout.

There is one case that particularly disturbs Oscar Maynez, as it does his opposite numbers at the FBI in El Paso. The killing of 17-year-old Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, abducted on St Valentine's Day 2000 outside a television shop, her body found a week later. The murder, says Maynez, bears the signatures of the women in the cotton field.

An FBI report on Lilia's killing was leaked to Mexico City's La Reforma, based on the testimony of three witnesses who, failing to gain a satisfactory audience in Juarez, crossed the Rio Grande. Lilia was abducted on her way back from the ProMex plastics maquila by hit men working for a Juarez drug cartel, said the report. The television store was known to be used as a conduit for cocaine dealing and among the attackers was a certain 'Raul', known to the authorities. After the girl was bundled into a white Thunderbird car, sounds of a struggle were heard, and a lookout disappeared into the shop. Taxi drivers parked on the other side of the street looked on, said the witnesses, doing nothing. 'Someone must have seen something,' says Norma Andrade, Lilia's mother, 'and the only people who could possibly get away with this is someone who had some connection to the police.' The FBI document was dismissed by Juarez authorities as 'erroneous'. But the El Paso Times newspaper reported that people in Juarez, falsely claiming to be FBI agents, were knocking on doors in search of the witnesses. Lilia's body was dumped 300 yards from the ProMex maquila. She had been held alive for five days, raped, tortured and strangled. Forensic reports suggested she had been bound by police handcuffs.

'What kills me,' says Norma Andrade, 'is that the people who did this are out there somewhere, maybe doing it again to some other girl. But I am sticking with my determination that whoever did this be punished. I am fighting impunity, that the authorities are allowing this to happen.'

A primary schoolteacher, Norma lives on the southern edges of Juarez in a house filled with the sounds of children playing; children of neighbours, nieces, nephews, and Lilia's own two children, Jade, now three, and Kaleb, aged two. They call their grandmother 'Mama', while their real mother's portrait sits on a shelf.

'The authorities never bothered to call,' recalls Norma of the day they found her daughter's corpse. 'I heard from someone out of the blue, and went down to the morgue. Even now, they never call me, because they know I know they have consistently lied about my daughter's case. They said she had been tied with shoelaces, I know it was police handcuffs. They said there were no marks of strangulation, I know there were. It's up to me to go down there and pester them.' Lilia's murder has been categorised as a 'crime of passion'. Her (separated) husband was accordingly interviewed and struck off any suspect list - but the crime not re-categorised. 'He wouldn't have the trousers to do it anyway,' sneers Norma.

'The facts speak for themselves. She had been dead 30 hours when they found her, but had been missing a week. My life has totally changed. I trust no one. I could count them on one hand. Only two, actually, Martha Cabrera at the school where I teach, and Marisela Ortiz.'

After Lilia was murdered, Norma went to her daughter's former high school teacher, Marisela Ortiz, to urge her to become involved. An elegant woman who hides rage beneath a bushel of civility, Marisela founded Nuestras Hijas in the belief that, 'It's time to challenge the entire order here, and meanwhile take care of the mothers - and the children who are orphaned. Many of those are growing up to be drug addicts, or gang members.'

Marisela has herself become the target of harassment. One night recently, she was driving home, trailed by an SUV. It followed her bumper- to-bumper, until she gave it the slip. 'I was terrified,' she says, '... it was a clear signal.' But it is not threats, she says, that deter her. Nor even the response of the authorities, whom she believes to be complicit anyway. Rather, it is the response of the maquiladores that 'takes away our hope'.

The silence of the maquila companies over the slaughter of their employees was perhaps loudest in the case of 17-year-old Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, one of the eight found in the cotton field. She had worked for Lear, but was sent away one morning for being three minutes late. That was the day Claudia, turned away alone, disappeared. The company's official response to her subsequent death was that, 'Gonzalez's murder did not happen on Lear property.' In response to the attempted murder of the 14-year-old bus rape survivor Nancy lllaba Gonzalez, her employer, the Milwaukee-owned Motores Electricos, said only: 'It is not our policy to hire anyone under 16.' The company filed legal papers against the family for helping Nancy to forge false identification.

There are mounting suspicions as to who is behind the malefaction of Ciudad Juarez. A writer from Mexico City, Sergio Gonzalez, accuses specific families who entwine the drug trade with big business and the authorities. (For his pains, Gonzalez was beaten up twice - once so badly he was hospitalised with a blood clot to the brain.) Diana Washington Valdez of the El Paso Times names the same families, and these converge with The Observer 's findings. They include landowners, major drug dealers, construction barons, energy suppliers - and officials in both government and the police. Their motives are unclear. 'One thing is certain,' says Norma Andrade. 'Whoever is killing is killing for pleasure.'

Outside the Juarez offices of the Chihuahua state authorities, a forest of little crosses is planted in a scrap of lawn. Each cross, beginning in 1993, bears a name, starting with Ivonne Estrada Salas; one for each recovered corpse, and towards the present, they bunch for lack of space. Many are unidentified because, explains Rosario Acosta of Nuestras Hijas, 'so many girls came alone from the south, and have no one here that knows them'

Inside, there are frosty handshakes with the head of the special office for sexual homicides, Angela Talavera. She is happy, she says, to answer questions. 'Most were seduced by men who took advantage of the situation. But others were taken by force. There is no fixed pattern.'

Talavera gets little opportunity to speak, as most questions are answered by a bullish, discomforting man, Manuel Esparzo, former head of the unit, now in charge of liaison. Esparzo details the categories of sexual homicide and statistics involved. There have been 229 during the period under discussion, of which, he says, 163 have been solved, leaving 66 ongoing investigations. Of the 229, 70 were sexual homicides, of which 24 have been solved, with 46 pending. The other categories include 'argument related', 'accidental death', and the largest, 'crimes of passion'. No concerned person in Juarez - and certainly not Esparzo's former colleague Oscar Maynez - accepts either these figures or his categorisations.

I ask about the case of Lilia Andrade, the 'crime of passion'. 'When we talk about this particular subject,' he says only, with contempt, ' her mother always misinterprets what we are saying'. On the recent 'overdose' case, Talavera pitches in: 'It is true her pants were slightly above the knee, and her handbag on her arm close to the neck. The medical examiner did the autopsy. She did not have any type of sexual assault on her.' [Oscar Maynez finds the argument laughable: 'I have seen no end of overdoses. They do not have pants halfway down their legs and purse strings around their necks.']

The question of 'big families' and possible connections to the authorities is quickly dismissed. 'When I was in charge of this unit,' Esparzo interupts, 'we did have information about a specific person. It didn't lead anywhere. It was one of these powerful people, but that didn't stop us then, and it wouldn't stop us now.'

And the murdered lawyer, Escobedo? 'He wasn't the attorney. The attorney was his father... I don't know how it transpired, but unfortunately the attorney was killed. However, it had nothing to do with the bus drivers.' ['Mario Escobedo,' affirms Oscar Maynez, 'was the registered attorney for one of the bus drivers. That is in the records.'] The meeting concludes with an assurance from Esparzo that only three of all the bodies recovered were mutilated. The FBI, he says, is welcome in Juarez, 'for training' - but not to help with investigations. Meanwhile, the movement outside is preparing to act above the heads of Esparzo and his prosecution team.

In August 2002, the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Organisation of American States, Juan Mendez, was in Juarez to discuss immigration to the US. He found himself - not unwillingly - ambushed by a delegation led by Marisela's partner in founding Nuestras Hijas, Rosario Acosta, plus five bereaved mothers, including Norma Andrade. Thus began the coming phase in the campaign for justice in Juarez. Nuestras Hijas, with others, intends to file suit through the Inter-American Court against the Mexican government for failing to intervene. One document supporting their case was compiled by a commission tasked by the Mexican government itself in 1998, damning the state authorities. It vanished down a black hole.

Back with Rosario this month, the pellucid light in her eyes is fading. 'It is a desolate landscape now,' she says. 'There's no one to turn to in Mexico any more. While this game goes on, more women die. No, that road has ended now. This can only be solved if we challenge the mechanism whereby the law is enforced. What drives me,' she says, 'is not "activism" - it is rage and sorrow. Sometimes I feel the organisation is full of women working together, sometimes that we are just a few, and sometimes that I am totally alone.'

Rosario talks not only about the crimes, but their impact after 10 years. 'This is a decomposing society. We are witnessing its destruction - women in pain who cannot turn to society, suffering cancer through stress, children to take care of, and domestic violence against women rampant.' The battering of women in Juarez is through the roof - even those rare instances reported to the police increased by 300 per cent during the month after the eight bodies in the cotton field. 'This message of complete impunity is having terrible effects in all directions,' says Esther Chavez. 'What can I say if a woman says, "I can't come again, because he says he'll dump my body in the cotton field?"'

Meanwhile, Norma is proceeding with her own investigation, 'looking into that narco television shop.' I won't let this go. I do it for the children. So long as they call me "Mama", I have Lilia with me, and a reason to get up each day and fight on.'

Revisiting Paula Gonzalez, it is near Christmas time, and she has a model nativity scene laid out on the floor. A sign of restored faith? 'Maybe,' replies Paula pensively. 'At the beginning, I prayed a lot, and I still do. But I never really recovered my faith after that moment, with Sagrario's Virgin. Maybe with time, I will get it back.' Her deep, comfortless eyes move across the photographs of her dead daughter, and back to mid-distance. 'Because justice is what I crave. Justice against her killer and against all of the killers. There is no justice in Juarez, so I have given up on that. I have my work to do here, meanwhile, and wait for the justice of God.'